The use of smartphones, tablet and other mobile computing devices has reached great popularity in the modern society. This fueled tremendous growth in the development of mobile applications that run on the mobile computing devices. In the majority of cases, these mobile applications are downloaded by users from an application store, such as Google Play or the App Store. In addition to the applications, these stores provide the users of mobile computing devices with an opportunity to familiarize themselves with a description of a particular application, view screen shots of the application, evaluate it and leave a feedback.
There are a number of applications designed to restrict the use of the device on which they are installed. Such applications include, for example, applications of “parental control” type, such as Kaspersky Safe Kids, or KES for Android. In general case, such restrictive applications are designed so that the user of the device, such as a child, cannot use game applications too long, or visit certain sites, for example. The restrictive nature of such applications is such that the user of a mobile device having limited, restricted capabilities/permissions (e.g., restrictions on access to certain websites or applications) is not satisfied with the presence of such a restrictive application on his/her computing device. Accordingly, such dissatisfied users may submit punitive negative feedback in the application stores, which unfairly negatively impacts the other users trusting such an application. The negative feedback from a user having restricted capabilities (meaning in the present case the capabilities of using the computing device) might only indicate about how the restrictive application handles its task well. It is important to note that the capability of evaluating such an application in the applications store should not be available to a user who is restricted and dissatisfied with the application, but rather to a person who installs (or initiates the installing of) the restrictive application (for example, in the case of the Kaspersky Safe Kids application, this is the parent of the child who is using the device, whereas the capabilities of the child using the device are in fact restricted by the application).
Various methods are used to prevent unfair evaluations having a negative impact on the trust placed in applications, including methods which analyze the nature of a change in evaluations: whether it is similar to the evaluations produced using bot nets or not. Although these methods are aimed at solving certain problems in the area of identifying unfair evaluations, they do not solve the problem of preventing such evaluations or solve it inefficiently. Accordingly, there is a need for improvements in this area of technology.